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The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

typography.guru

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Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#51

Post by vacri »

legulere wrote: post #31
quink wrote: post #4

Arguments against: ß is a ligature, one of ss. ffl is a ligature, but that doesn't mean FFL should have one too. Just get rid of it. Switzerland did and they're managing just fine. Capitalisation in Unicode for German locales is just a headache, and this really doesn't help. How would one enter it on a keyboard? Argument for: ss is pretty much the same shape as SS, and Dutch has ij and IJ. It's just an optional ruling, a…

It started out as a ligature of ſ and ʒ, forms of s and z that don't exist anymore today in German. And it became a letter like æ did. Also this happened at a time where z was pronounced differently from how it is pronounced today.

I can't speak for other languages, but in English æ isn't really a letter in the modern tongue. It's just used when someone wants to be 'fancy'. You'll see athenaeum far more than you see athenæum, for example.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#53

Post by [deleted] »

kuschku wrote: post #32
tptacek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is using "ss" instead of ß in German any worse from using "th" instead of þ in English?

Take the words Maße (measurements, sizes) and Masse (weight, mass). There’s hundreds more of such examples. ß and ss have a different effect on surrounding letters (the a in Maße is short, the one in Masse is long)

[deleted]

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#54

Post by bla2 »

tptacek wrote: post #29
bla2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a German, I disagree with you. German's not English, even though you might prefer if it was. Others don't. It's fine that it uses the letters it ended up with historically. This change fixes an internal inconsistency, your reply seems fairly irrelevant. It feels like replying to some bugfix in, say, Ruby with something like "I never liked Ruby anyhow".

How is using "ss" instead of ß in German any worse from using "th" instead of þ in English?

I don't think there's anything wrong with þ either. It fell out of favor, so it went away. If ß falls out of favor one day that's fine, but at the moment it's part of the language and that's fine too.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#55

Post by bla2 »

tptacek wrote: post #29
bla2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a German, I disagree with you. German's not English, even though you might prefer if it was. Others don't. It's fine that it uses the letters it ended up with historically. This change fixes an internal inconsistency, your reply seems fairly irrelevant. It feels like replying to some bugfix in, say, Ruby with something like "I never liked Ruby anyhow".

How is using "ss" instead of ß in German any worse from using "th" instead of þ in English?

I don't think there's anything wrong with þ either. It fell out of favor, so it went away. If ß falls out of favor one day too that's fine, but at the moment it's part of the language, and that's fine too.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#56

Post by pishpash »

errata wrote: post #41
kuschku wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the words Maße (measurements, sizes) and Masse (weight, mass). There’s hundreds more of such examples. ß and ss have a different effect on surrounding letters (the a in Maße is short, the one in Masse is long)

I think you meant it the other way 'round? long/short, I mean. Otherwise I totally agree, ß is important to distinguish phonetics.

It is important but you are marking the wrong thing, you could make it Māsse and Masse if you really cared.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#58

Post by cbmueller »

rb2k_ wrote: post #30
cbmueller wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a ligature for "sz" - at least it used to be. You probably won't find many german words that have an actual "sz" in them.

There are tons according to http://www.wordmine.info/Search.aspx?slang=de&stype=words-wi... FRAKTIONSZWANG FREIHANDELSZONE KONFISZIEREN [...] A lot of them are combined, but still quite a few 'regular' ones

Here is the full list of non compounded words containing an "sz".

Abszeß - Adoleszenz - Disziplin - Eszett - Faszie - Faszination - Fluoreszenz - Koaleszenz - Konfiszierung - lasziv - Lumineszenz - Obszönität - omniszient - Oszillation - phosphoresziere - Plebiszit - Proszenium - Rekognoszierung - Rekonvaleszent - Szene - viszeral

Most of these actually are of latin origin. My favorite is obviously "Abszeß" - probably the only word in the german language that will show a non compounded co-existence of "sz" and "ß".

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#59

Post by detaro »

weinzierl wrote: post #50

Most commenters seem to be under the impression that German orthography gained a new letter, or that uppercase sharp S will be the norm. This is not the case. From the original article: > The change doesn’t mean that everyone now has to use a Capital Sharp S. The previous spelling of replacing ß with SS in uppercase texts remains the default for the time being. The Council for German Orthography sanctioned the use of…

It's a bit more important than that, since ẞ didn't "exist" in official use before (if you have a name with ß, the spelling on your ID card can now use ẞ, instead of SS where its unclear if it is ss or ß, now it becomes valid in schools, ...), but yes, it's only an accepted variant now.

Re: The capital sharp S in now part of the official German orthography

#60

Post by dpkendal »

faho wrote: post #5

As a german, I see this as a step in the wrong direction. The sharp S is a PITA to begin with, so I'd rather abolish it completely. Now there's a whole bunch of complications coming from this - how do I type this? To type lowercase "ß", I press the key above "p" (in the same position as with qwerty) and "ü" (to the right of it), which will do "?" when pressed together with shift. So do we move "?" somewhere else? QWE…

As a learner/non-native speaker of German, please don't abolish the only way to tell the vowel length of an unfamiliar word.
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